


RED

by Hinalilly



Series: Hina's Cheesy Rinharu Week Oneshots [5]
Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Don't go where I can't follow, I've always admired you, M/M, Rinharu Week, everything went dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 21:51:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2667596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinalilly/pseuds/Hinalilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anyone would’ve said that Haru hated the color red.</p>
<p>And yet he was always covered in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	RED

**Author's Note:**

> RRAAUUUuuuuguhgGHGHGHGHhgfhghFGHHH UUUuuuhhUUUFHFHGHHHEAaAAARRRGHHHhH GUUUHHhhUUUOOOoOHHh grRRRhghhAAAOOoooHGHH
> 
> (translation: "it has graphic descriptions but it's also rather mild in general so _how do I rate this_ ")
> 
> The 5th entry on Hina's "like HELL I'm gonna let any of these great prompts go to waste" Rinharu Week adventure!  
> I wanted to write around 10 different things for Day 5's prompts, so can anyone tell me why the hell did I go for a Zombie Outbreak AU? (The answer is probably "because it was the cheesiest choice." Naturally.)

 

 

_We’ll definitely meet again. And then I’ll return that stupid t-shirt of yours._

_… take care of Gou._

 

 

Those were the last words that Haru had heard from Rin. He’d never been very keen on cell phones, but a few weeks earlier there was little he wouldn’t have given for one.

Now he’d just… stopped hoping for anything at all.

Ever since they’d lost contact with Rin's group, Haru had been keeping a vigilant track of time. He would repeat the month, number, day of the week in his head like a mantra, watching the sun, counting hours, minutes, seconds. The makeshift spear he carried with him still had the little scratch marks he’d religiously made on it every night.

He wasn’t keeping track anymore.

The day when Haru’s group had finally arrived at Rin's last known location, only to find a battered and bloodied Samezuka jacket right in the middle of a lethargic mob—that’s when he’d stopped counting.

Haru didn’t remember much of that moment except for sounds. The screams of his friends reverberating in the back of his mind as he leapt right into the mob to retrieve it, the groans and shuffling feet, the sounds of decaying bone being cracked open, hollow thuds, his own breath racing, and the foreign sound of angered cries that, on retrospect, didn’t sound like they had come from his own voice at all.

The stench of the putrid flesh that had splattered on him from head to toe back then still followed him even now, but he didn’t care.

He’d stopped caring about anything that day.

 

There was Nagisa, still trying his best to keep everyone cheerful and always thinking positive, even when he himself had no idea where his relatives were, even though he was the one who cried the loudest, when he thought nobody could hear. There was Rei, who’d stopped making calculations and blabbering about statistics out loud, and instead chose to focus on planning out their movements and pointing out the safest spots for resting and keeping watch, taking on an almost paranoid responsibility for everyone’s safety. There was Makoto, who seemed to always be hanging on the edge of trying to remain calm and composed and panicking in fear and worry, always looking undecided between acting as if nothing had changed and staring at everyone as if he had a thousand things to say but he didn’t know where to start. There was Kou, smiling every now and then in gratitude but also quieter than ever, who instead of pulling back seemed to turn fiercer than any of them whenever they came under attack, letting her anguish out with each kill, wearing her brother’s tattered jacket like a war trophy.

And then there was Haru.

Haru did nothing.

He rarely talked, rarely took part in decisions, never smiled again. He moved sluggishly, only if absolutely necessary, and fought swiftly, only when there was no other choice. He usually stood watch, simply because he usually didn’t feel like closing his eyes at all. He only ate when prompted by others (mostly Nagisa, who’d practically force the food into Haru’s mouth after his fourth or fifth “I’m not hungry”). Nothing moved him, nothing motivated him, and Haru didn’t really want anything to. Nothing seemed to get through to him anymore.

Nothing except the color red.

Haru went absolutely livid at the sight of a head of red, rushing straight into danger with no second thought and absolutely no regard for his safety, ignoring the cries of his group and the growls and steps around him, just like that day.

He just ran, his weapon forgotten and focused on nothing but the red in his line of sight, until he came face to face with the bearer of that head, mangled, rotten, completely devoid of life and feeling.

It was never right.

There was no smile, no grin, no brilliance. There were no defined features, no long eyelashes, no sharp teeth, no soft bangs over blushing cheeks, no spark of defiance in a pair of bright red, red eyes.

It was never the right one.

So Haru pummeled it to the ground.

He’d punch the moving corpse straight in the jaw, toppling it to the ground to the sound of cracking bones and languid groans. He’d straddle it, ignoring the chaos around him as his friends rushed to keep him from getting killed, and he’d continue beating the thing under him, sending chunks of skin and flesh flying with each consecutive blow, crushing the softened skull and squashing the lifeless eyeballs under his knuckles, punching the entire face in with his bare hands until there was nothing left of it, nothing but an indistinguishable pool of putrid fluids and clumps of shapeless flesh in front of him, the red mixed in with browns and blacks, staining the ground and his clothes and his hands and his face.

Haru stared at it, motionless, even when the battle was still going on around him, even when his friends kept yelling at him to get up and fight.

There was red all over him. But it still wasn’t right.

So he did nothing.

 

Eventually the red vanished, and Haru’s world remained dark.

 

There were reprimands, efforts at trying to make him realize what a reckless and crazy thing he did (every time, every single time), how he couldn’t continue like this anymore. Haru was used to hearing it; it was always the same set of words. His friends’ worries, their fear, their frustration, their anxiety, their loss at what to do, their desire to hear him out and do something to help, he heard it all, but he couldn’t listen. It was as if the words didn’t settle in his head, flowing in and out of his ears with the same lack of permanence as the constant moaning of the dead bodies littering the streets.

He couldn’t listen, but he’d rather live forever with those screams and questions than endure the silence that would come if he stopped.

He knew it was stupid and dangerous, but Haru couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stop the surge of emotion that boiled up inside him every time he spotted red hair among the countless, nameless faces around them. He couldn’t contain the anger, the hate, the fickle burst of both hope and dread that took over him; it made him feel both glad and afraid to be alive, and he _had_ to make sure.

So he kept doing it, frightening any survivors they came across with his recklessness, and driving his friends to panic by putting himself in danger, time and time again. He turned from an apathetic, hopeless teen into a frenzied killing machine in a mere second, shoving both things alive and dead out of his way until he could grasp those dirty red bangs between his fingers, ignoring the screams and the yells and the desperate pleas for him to come back, completely unfazed by the horrified stares he received whenever he showed up entirely drenched in blood. The stench never did leave him.

Each one he faced, each one he killed—each time he found himself staring down at a faceless corpse, covered in splatters and clots of blood. He was both grateful and furious at each one of them.

Because it was never Rin.

 

Haru spaced out often. He thought of “what if”s and “should have”s all the time. What if Rin had never left, what if he had still been attending Iwatobi instead of Samezuka, what if Haru had chased right after him when it all went to hell instead of actually listening to him and fetching Kou instead. He should’ve made sure to keep better track of his phone, to make sure it was always charged. He should’ve moved faster, been more aggressive. He might have been on time. He might not have lost Rin. Again.

He knew Rin was going to come back to him eventually. He always did.

And it kept him going.

And it was frightening.

He often thought about what he would do when it eventually happened, when he finally came across the undead that wore Rin’s face, when he was finally hit with the realization that the Rin he wanted to find was actually gone for good.

Haru never had an answer to that question.

One some days, he guessed he would probably do as he always did, smash that fake face to shreds with his bare hands until there was nothing left, before it tainted the memory of what the real Rin was supposed to look like, and then go back to searching, looking for something he would never find. Maybe he’d scream and cry and grab the corpse by the shoulders, or whatever part of it was left, shaking it viciously, demanding Rin to snap out of it, as if that would make him come back. Or maybe he wouldn’t do anything, maybe he would just stand there in place, accepting everything without a word, just watching as the thing that had once been Rin ripped the living flesh off his bones and devoured him alive. On some days, Haru favored one ending over the other. Other times, he was undecided. Most of the time, he just didn’t care, as long as his fruitless search came to an end one day.

He wanted to find Rin, but he also didn’t want to find Rin—he just wanted to _know_.

 

Haru was lost in his thoughts as usual when Rei finally caught his attention, stopping him in the middle of the street, and dragging him to crouch behind the fence of a small house. Since Nagisa had sprained his ankle recently and Makoto refused to leave him and Kou alone, it was just the two of them going out for supplies this time. Thankfully, they’d recently moved into a less populated area of town, so the undead were also fewer, and they’d gone without spotting any large mobs for a while now. They’d been lucky to find a lot of places that had yet to be looted, and the possessions of the many people that had already ran away (and had probably not made it) had come in handy to their survival so far. Food was still not the easiest thing to come by (they tried to stick close to the ocean, just so fishing was always an option), but fortunately there were still a few cans and other preserved food left here and there that could still be consumed. Haruka turned his eyes a little reluctantly in the direction Rei was pointing at, hoping both that everything would be peaceful and that it would not be when he did.

As much as Haruka hated spotting a dead redhead, it was also pretty much the only thing he looked forward to these days.

But it wasn’t a group of zombies that Rei had been trying to get Haru to notice. A bit farther ahead, in the backyard of one of the houses they had yet to check, Haru could clearly see a batch of freshly washed clothes, hanged to dry, fluttering softly in the morning breeze. The dead didn’t do laundry, Rei concluded out loud comically for both of them, and he emphasized the importance of being extremely careful.

Haru heard, but he didn’t listen.

Instead, against all warnings, and ignoring all of Rei’s hushed cries for him to come back, Haru rushed out, sprinting towards the house, and heading into the backyard without the least regard for his own safety. He went straight towards the clothes line, his weapon dropped and forgotten somewhere along the way, and snatched a single item from it, grasping it in his shaky hands and breathing heavily, his heart pulsing with shock and anger.

There was no doubt about it.

It was _his_.

It was _his_ t-shirt.

It was his absolute favorite t-shirt that he’d let Rin borrow months ago, and that he’d never, ever thought he would recover.

There was no blood on it, no stains or rips or anything wrong with it, but it was the first time in his life that Haru was seeing so much _red_.

Like _hell_ if he wasn’t going to brutally murder whoever had taken it from him.

Fingers curling around it with force, Haru turned to fetch his weapon; warnings be damned, he was going to raid the house for explanations (maybe) and no words from Rei or anyone else were going to be able to stop him.

He had barely turned his back to the house when he was suddenly tackled to the ground face first, a faint taste of blood and dirt filling his mouth, his ears buzzing for a moment. Haru struggled to shake his attacker off, much too strong and warm and persistent for an undead, and an escape route effectively scratched out from his mind when the tackle quickly developed into the t-shirt being wrestled out of his hands.

Like _hell_.

Haru grit his teeth and elbowed back with difficulty, as hard as he could in such little space, wriggling to turn himself around while still keeping a firm grip on the t-shirt. Relenting the hold of one of his two hands momentarily, Haru shoved back again, and there was finally a groan and a slight stagger from behind him, which Haru quickly took advantage of to flip both of them over, pushing his forearm against the guy’s neck and straddling him still.

Haru was panting heavily and still seeing red, his chin stinging painfully from the fall, his one-handed grip on the t-shirt still being shared with the person in front of him.

He’d been ready to growl and yell and bite and scratch and do anything in his power to recover what was his.

Instead, he held his breath.

He kept his eyes wide open, not wanting to blink even once, because he was still seeing red.

He was indeed seeing red, but it was vibrant and shaky and very much _alive_ , red hair splayed on the ground below him, smudged with dirt and sweat, but just as vivid and soft-looking as he remembered it. He was seeing bright red eyes fixed on him, vibrating with shock and shimmering slightly with fresh tears.

He heard a voice, _that_ voice, choked and uncertain and just as frighteningly hopeful as Haru’s own unsaid words, burning down his throat and in his heart and in his gut.

“… Haru?”

His grip on the t-shirt slipped, his arms suddenly devoid of strength. Both Rei’s voice in the distance and Yamazaki’s yells from inside the house went completely unnoticed.

A single drop of blood fell from his chin, and Haru welcomed the pain that told him he wasn’t dreaming.

A couple of tears fell, a hoarse laughter rang in his ears. Even through blurry eyes, Haru could see that brilliant grin, just the way he remembered it, that smile that _knew_ , just _knew_ that Haru would be out there, somewhere, keeping him waiting until the very last moment to make his return.

Rin laughed and cried and held Haru close all at the same time, and he _knew it_ , he knew, he’d always known.

“You thought you’d get rid of me that easily?” Rin laughed at him, _for_ him, wiping his tears away with dirt-smudged hands.

_Of course not. Never._

Through teary eyes and trembling lips, and with an insurmountable relief washing over him, at last, Haru saw red, and smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> Blame [Echo](http://echocave.tumblr.com) for the idea! Then blame me cause I changed it slightly to make it even cheesier. Hehe.


End file.
